Numbers Don't Lie
Sabermetrics Deep Dive
There are two ways to forecast the rest of a baseball season. You can stare at the talent—the rotations, the lineups, the run differentials—and project who's better. Or you can stare at the schedule and ask a duller, more decisive question: who still has to play whom?
For most of this WLB season the first method has been the guide. Today we lean on the second, because the single most important fact about the remaining schedule has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with sequencing. The six human teams have played wildly uneven shares of their games against the computer-managed Hurricanes and Nukes—and those games are very nearly automatic. Human clubs are 153-23 against the two computer teams this year, an .869 clip. A computer game is not a coin flip. It is, for a competent roster, a win with a rain delay.
And the inventory of those near-automatic wins is distributed in a way that is about to reshuffle the standings.
At an .869 win rate, Iron Knob's 22 remaining computer games are worth roughly 19 wins. Fugging's 21 are worth about 18. Huanca's 20, about 17. The Astleys, Knockemstiff, and Nicaragua have 8 or 9 apiece—worth seven wins each. The difference between Iron Knob's cupcake inventory and Nicaragua's is on the order of a dozen near-automatic victories, and it lands almost entirely on the race for second place and the scrum at the bottom.
A 7.5-game lead with a +297 run differential—nearly double the next-best mark in the league—is not a lead that the computer-game gap can erase. Yes, the Astleys have only nine cupcakes left while Iron Knob has 22; that closes the margin at the edges, but it does not threaten the top of the standings. Burris's club is the best offense with 681 runs and the best run-prevention unit allowing 384 runs in the WLB. Jay Howell is back from the injured list, and Lou Whitaker returns this week to stabilize second base. Garrelts at 2.27 ERA, Bryn Smith at 16-3, and Eric Davis with 41 homers and a league-leading 118 RBI are not the kind of names that surrender ten-game leads.
The weakness is clear: this team cannot come from behind. The Astleys are 1-25 when trailing after seven innings. They don't have to come from behind often, because they're usually ahead, but in a short October series against a club that can take an early lead, a lineup that goes quiet when it has to manufacture is a genuine vulnerability.
Iron Knob and Knockemstiff are separated by a single game in the loss column, but Iron Knob has 22 computer games left to Knockemstiff's 8. That is a built-in head start of roughly a dozen near-automatic wins, and it is the single biggest reason to expect Iron Knob's club to finish second and the Slap Daddies third, despite their being effectively tied today.
The pitching remains the identity—a 3.51 staff ERA, Blyleven at 2.70, Kevin Brown at 12-3, and the league's save leader in Davis with 26—and the defense behind it is still the best infrastructure in the WLB. Rickey Henderson with 72 steals and a red-hot Tony Gwynn at .583 over his last seven make the offense go.
The weakness is the offense, full stop. Iron Knob has scored 546 runs, fewest among the top three and distant behind the Astleys' 681 and Knockemstiff's 669. When Henderson and Gwynn are quiet, the lineup has no thunder—just 103 home runs as a team, in a league where Knockemstiff has 167 and Huanca 166. This is a club that wins 4-2, not 9-6, and a cold week from its two catalysts can produce a stretch of 3-1 losses.
The Slap Daddies own the second-most wins in the WLB, and they did it the way they always do—Bonilla at .366 with a league-best 1.132 OPS, Mitchell with 41 homers and 106 RBI, McGriff, and Sierra hanging crooked numbers nightly. The pitching even came around; their stretch ERA since June was a respectable 3.56.
But the schedule is unkind. Knockemstiff has just 8 computer games left—the same near-empty cushion as the Astleys and Nicaragua—and 38 games against human rosters, the second-most in the league. Where Iron Knob gets to pad its total against the Hurricanes and Nukes down the stretch, this club has to earn nearly everything the hard way. That is the difference that drops them to third despite the win total.
The weakness is the late innings. The Slap Daddies blew leads all week, and the bullpen's blown-save rate has been the soft spot under the offense all year. The rotation behind Nolan Ryan with 153 strikeouts is thin, and against 38 straight games of human competition, depth is exactly what gets exposed.
Chris Broyles's club is in fourth, and the 20 computer games it has banked for the stretch run are the only reason it isn't lower. Those near-automatic wins—worth roughly 17 of them—will prop Huanca up the rest of the way. The power is real: 166 home runs as a team, Howard Johnson with 30 homers and Kent Hrbek anchoring a lineup that can change a game with one swing.
The weaknesses are two, intertwined. First, on-base ability—a .325 team OBP that is the worst among the contenders and turns the offense into an all-or-nothing proposition. Second, run prevention: Huanca's in-play average against has climbed above .310 on the season and was .335 over the summer, the worst mark in the league. That is the defensive leak—balls finding grass that better gloves would convert—and it inflates the ERA no matter how the arms throw. Brian Harper returns from the injured list this week, which helps behind the plate, but the up-the-middle defense is the structural wound.
Nicaragua is tied with Huanca for fourth, and this club has the best pitching peripherals in the league—the top K/BB ratio, Clemens with 139 strikeouts, Saberhagen, and Jimmy Key. By talent, this is not the sixth-best team in the WLB.
By schedule, it might finish there anyway. Nicaragua has only 8 computer games left—it has already cashed nearly all of its easy wins, going 33-3 against the Hurricanes and Nukes—and faces 40 games against human rosters, tied for the most in the league. While Fugging and Huanca pad their records against the computers down the stretch, the Crepe Wrappers have to fight real teams 40 more times. A club that went 9-21 against humans over the summer, now handed the hardest remaining human slate and the emptiest cupcake cushion, is the most likely of the six to finish last—not because it's the worst team, but because it spent its schedule relief in May and June and has none left.
The weakness is offense, badly. Nicaragua has scored 551 runs with just 90 home runs, fewest among the human clubs, and the lineup cratered over the summer. The pitching is being wasted. Barry Bonds returns from the injured list this week, which helps, but one bat doesn't fix a lineup this quiet.
Garth Graham's club sits sixth, half a game out of fourth, and it has the same lifeline Huanca does: 21 computer games left, worth roughly 18 near-automatic wins. That cushion is the only thing keeping the Badgers' season breathing, because the rest of the operation is in trouble.
The offense is good—585 runs, Lonnie Smith at .926 OPS, Alvin Davis, Carlton Fisk, and Jack Clark all producing. The problem is everything that happens when the other team bats. Fugging has allowed 555 runs, by far the most among the human clubs, on the strength of a rotation that posted a 5.80 ERA over the summer and surrenders better than a hit an inning. Jeff Montgomery with 21 saves is a genuine asset at the back of the bullpen, but a closer is only as useful as the leads in front of him, and this rotation doesn't build many.
The weakness is starting pitching, and it isn't close. The Badgers' .299 quality-start rate is a rotation that hands games to the bullpen before the sixth inning. No amount of offense overcomes a staff that allows six a night.
If the rates hold—if the computer games go to form at roughly .87, and the human-vs-human records stay near their summer levels—the WLB should land like this: Rick Astleys around 107-47 in first; Iron Knob around 102-52 in second on the strength of 22 computer games left as the difference-maker; Knockemstiff around 96-58 in third with the most wins now but 38 human games and a shaky bullpen ahead; Fugging around 89-65 in fourth with 21 cupcakes propping up a team with a broken rotation; Huanca around 88-66 in fifth with 20 cupcakes masking a defense that leaks; and Nicaragua around 83-71 in sixth with the best peripherals but the worst remaining schedule and no cushion left.
The pennant is the Astleys'. The interesting baseball over the next seven weeks lives in two places: whether Iron Knob's schedule cushion is enough to hold off a more talented Knockemstiff club for second, and whether Nicaragua's superior arms can overcome the cruelest remaining schedule in the league to avoid finishing last. Both questions turn less on who's better than on who's left to play—which is the lesson of this whole exercise. In a league where a third of every team's schedule is a near-automatic win, the standings in August are partly a story about who already spent their easy games and who has a wave of them still coming.
The Astleys spent theirs and won anyway. Nicaragua spent theirs and may pay for it. And Iron Knob, Fugging, and Huanca are about to find out exactly how many games a roster full of cupcakes is worth.